Over the last 4 years, I have been part of the team that builds the Usage Analytics solution here at Coveo. This solution is based on AWS Redshift, a petabyte scale columnar store. We were early adopters of this data warehousing solution and while it is an awesome product today, I probably don’t need to tell you that we hit some bumps along the way. Here are some of the tips, tricks, and overall best practices we gathered during those years.
Creating secured item previews in Sitecore
Recently, I had to work on an interesting use case where my client wanted to display teasers of premium content to anonymous users in Sitecore. Once the users found what they were looking for, they were either redirected to a login page or to a subscribing page. No secrets, the strategy behind it is to increase conversion rates.
After working on the project, I realized that the business needs behind their request was fairly common. People want to show partial items to anonymous users, but still want them to be relevant and easy to find. Let me introduce you the CreateSecuredItemPreview solution.
Deploy Kubernetes in Production Automatically with Kops, Jenkins, and Terraform
Kubernetes: one hip word we see everywhere in the Cloud developer and Devops world. With reasons: Kubernetes does solve problems (and creates others) and simplify a lot of things. In this post we’ll explore how we deployed k8s to production automatically with help from Terraform, Jenkins, and Kops.
At Coveo, we decided that Kubernetes was the tool of choice to run our docker containers in production. This is replacing a “homemade” setup with AWS Opsworks and dockers. It will save money and resources, and enable faster deployments.
Randomizing Results from a Coveo Index
After reading the title of this post, you were probably wondering the same thing everyone asked us while working on this project:
Why?
And you would be right. Why would we want to remove Coveo’s most useful features: Machine Learning, sorting, and automatically-tuned relevancy?
There are 4 reasons:
- For fun
- To try to get different results each time you execute a query
- To test what we could achieve with the current infrastructure and tools
- But yeah, mostly for fun
This post will cover the road we had to walk to achieve such results.
Automate your infrastructure
In my life, I really love to automate recurring tasks. In my private life, I’ve been conceptualizing, building, and developing my home automation for many years. At work, I automate everything: scripts, servers, deployments, etc. And now in the cloud, I am automating the infrastructure.
It is not a new thing; automation is old, but it’s not in all data centers or cloud infrastructures. Let’s see why you would have to automate your infrastructure, except because it’s cool. There are other points to consider.
A story of TypeScript, webpack, and code splitting
In my last blog post, I talked about how we use webpack at Coveo, to improve our development process.
One of the most powerful feature offered by it is code splitting.
I’ll try to explain how we are leveraging it inside our project, and combining it with TypeScript.
Building a resource locator
This is the first blog post of a new series entitled “Build it with Coveo”. The series will present innovative use cases for the Coveo Platform, always including full code samples.
Coveo customers use the platform in a multitude of ways. Many in the consulting and resource management business often ask us if our search technology could help them better match resources and projects.
Use case:
What if you want to find the best peer/employee with knowledge around “Artificial Intelligence.”? What if you need to add constraints such as “available for the next two months.”?
Applying Site Search Best Practices using Sitecore Part 4
This is the last part of my long adventure to cover all the best practices listed in the Best Practices for Site Search eBook. The previous parts can be found here.
Automate Adding a Coveo Search Box In a Page Using Sitecore PowerShell Extensions
The Sitecore PowerShell Extensions is an amazing tool every Sitecore developer should learn to use. I recently started playing with it, my first goal being to find a solution to the popular request: automate adding a Coveo search box in a page.
Coveo Blitz 2017
7th edition
After months of preparation, the seventh edition of Coveo Blitz was held on January 7th 2017. As was the case in the last few years, the contest was held in our Quebec City office. Participants like to see our offices and the work environment we offer - oh, and here’s a scoop: next year, it will be held in our brand new offices!
A total of 58 students from 6 universities and colleges participated this year. We opened the registration on October 18th and all the available places (15 teams of 4) were filled by November 3rd.